Wednesday, May 7, 2014

You’re wrong about that, too - starting Notes from the Underground

Didn’t we all have fun with Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 What Is To Be Done?  And we have not even gotten to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s parodistic novella written a year later, Notes from the Underground, as it is commonly known, or Memoirs from a Mousehole as Nabokov charmingly calls it.  The little book otherwise lacks charm.  It begins with a thirty page rant by a madman, which is followed by sixty pages of a narrative of self-destruction and self-loathing culminating in a particularly vile act.  It is the finest of Dostoevsky’s comedies, I think, an early masterpiece of the comedy of humiliation.

Notes from the Underground also swallows What Is To Be Done? whole and transforms it into something new.  Knowing both books, it is beyond my capabilities to read one book independent of the other.  Dostoevsky is, obviously, the greater artist and thinker, but the books enrich each other.

Perhaps I should mention that just like the original Russian readers I have always read the books together.  Strike the part in italics for the truth, but I do know that Michael Katz’s 1989 edition of What Is To Be Done? was a brand new book when I bought and read it, which must have been just after I read Fathers and Sons and Dostoevsky and Nabokov’s Chernyshevsky-bashing The Gift.  I have been looking for a cluster of books like this ever since.  I did not understand at that point the extent to which Dostoevsky kept returning to the argument in his major novels, how characters with Chernyshevsky in their blood inhabit all of Dostoevsky’s major novels.

I have expressed skepticism and perhaps mockery of Dostoevsky’s art and ideas, but it is exciting to watch him at work.

The underground man, as I take him, is one of Chernyshevsky’s rational egoists intellectually, but is emotionally a bundle of neuroses, prejudices, and impulses (“caprices,” to use Chernyshevsky’s word).  He is a Chernyshevsky character with a human personality, with a soul.  It is like on Buffy the Vampire Slayer; you remember.  So Dostoevsky is attacking Chernyshevsky by taking his ideas to their illogical end.

This seems to be the heart of a century of critical debate about the novel, by the way.  Is the underground man mocking Chernyshevsky; does he agree with but also rebel against Chernyshevsky; or is he simply Dostoevsky’s mouthpiece?  I pick the middle option, the more subtle one.  In addition, is the underground man crazy, or really, how crazy is he, or more accurately, why is he so crazy?

You probably think, gentlemen, that I want to amuse you.  You’re wrong about that, too.  I’m not at all the cheerful fellow I seem to be, or that I may seem to be…  (I.2, 5)

Like Chernyshevsky’s narrator, the underground man argues with and mocks his imaginary readers.  Other images and scenes recur.  I will write about them.  Why else did I read these books if not to write about the parallel scenes where the protagonists bump into an officer on the street?

Maybe the next post will be all quotations, to balance this one.  Notes from the Underground is almost too quotable.  It is a distraction.

Page references to the Norton Critical Edition, Second Edition, translated by Michael Katz.

19 comments:

  1. I loved this novella, it has some of the finest rants in literature. I obviously read it without understanding that Dostoevsky was having a dialogue with Chernyshevsky. I'm not sure that's strong enough reason to read him.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Knowing Chernyshevsky, you can really see what made Dostoevsky fume. Which parts made him so mad that he had to counter them.

    All of the great later fictional ranters owe a strong debt to the Underground Man.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I remember reading Notes from the Underground when I was a particularly low point in my life a long time ago. Oddly enough, the book's nihilism made me feel better. And, of course, I had no understanding of the connection(s) with Chernyshevsky. Perhaps I need to read the Dostoevsky book again. I almost certainly misunderstood what I was reading. On the other hand, first impressions might be more worthwhile. Revised, later readings are sometimes a mistake. For example, I read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle when I was in high school, and I was most favorably impressed and blown away; when I read it years later, I thought the book was a waste of ink and paper. Which impression was more worthwhile? So, perhaps you see my point about my dilemma: do I read Notes again, or do I savor the dim memory of the first reading?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks for the information. I, too, have read Notes a number of times without being aware of the connection to Chernyshevsky. I recently got a copy of the Chernyshevsky, so I will be sure to read them in tandem.

    ReplyDelete
  5. The whole intellectual world around these writers begins to open up when you knock these books together. I might feel bad if some readers went for Chernyshevsky - not you, Fred.

    RT, if you are working on "impressions," I say skip it. But if you are interested in understanding a book, later readings are never a mistake. Are you reading for knowledge or experience?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I am schizophrenic as a reader. One of me is reading for knowledge. The other is reading for the experience. Perhaps a good dose of some psychotropic medicine will someday reconcile the split. In the meantime, as I wait for the medical miracle, I wallow in my schizophrenia.

      Delete
    2. Here is my less flippant response. My approach to a text depends upon the text. I read Flannery O'Connor, for example, as an analytical reader. On the other hand, I will read a recent Edgar award or Anthony award winning mystery novel for the entertainment experience. Surely there is room for both readers in one mind.

      Delete
  6. I should think there's room also for education and entertainment. A great book is one that both entertains and educates. Lesser books are those that do one or the other, or one well and the other poorly. A poor book, on the other hand, is one that does neither.

    ReplyDelete
  7. This is what I am always saying: You can do both, simultaneously. A reader can do many things at once.

    But it turns out this is a minority position. If I have learned anything from book bloggers, it is this. Thus, the "spoiler alert" crowd, and the people who are "afraid" to revisit a childhood favorite now that they have been corrupted by knowledge.

    "Entertainment" is not quite the right word. The readers I am thinking of are not exactly reading for entertainment. They are reading for "love," searching for books that generate whatever that experience is they call "love." "I didn't expect to love this book, but I did!" Or vice versa.

    ReplyDelete
  8. My opinion, today anyway (I finished my rereading of Notes last night, about 10:00), is that the Underground Man is the result of Dostoyevsky's testing of Chernyshevsky's theory that mankind would be happy were he rational. Suppose man were given only rational options, FD says, and the Underground Man is what would result. He is forced underground, beneath the feet of the Rational Man as it were, because at heart man is irrational and the more you attempt to force rational behavior onto him, the more irrational man will become. Then FD puts his test subject into versions of scenes from What is to be Done?. Or something close to that. I can submit textual evidence in support of this claim later. Maybe I will, though that's not the most interesting thing about this book except that I will add one thing: FD argues in most of his writing that man is essentially irrational; I don't know how much of that is reaction to Chernyshevsky and his pals and how much of it is just FD's world view. I don't want to blame/credit exposure to Chernyshevsky's novel too much for FD's subsequent work.

    Is it a spoiler to say that I laughed out loud when the bordello was fronted by a dress shop? When the entire Liza episode was revealed to be a parody of the Lupokhov/Vera marriage and liberation in WitbD? That was pretty great stuff. That's the episode Chekhov used as the basis of one of his longer (and best) stories, 25 years later. I was both entertained and informed.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In FD's letters to his brother, he complains that the censors cut out the most important part of the narrative, the Christian message that gives an alternative to scientific rationalism. FD apparently never restored those passages when he had the chance to republish the novella later. Has anyone seen the complete original text, and do the missing parts essentially change the work? I don't expect anyone to actually have an answer. I suppose I could avail myself of, say, a library or something.

      Delete
  9. Recent French language examples of entertaining and enriching writers: Simenon, Modiano, Volodine. They write what could be called 'genre' fiction. Sanctuary, Laughter in the Dark and Blood Meridian are also 'genre' fiction, by the way. And so are Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, Pu Song Ling's ghost and fox tales, Kafka's short stories, Borges fictions, etc. Knowing beforehand what those texts are doing at the surface level (their basic plot, the 'entertaining' part) allows the readers to notice a lot of the other things they're doing at a deeper level (the 'enriching' part).

    On the other hand, I would have hated to have had the plot of some of Henry James' stories spoiled before reading them for the first time (The Middle Years, The Friends of the Friends, etc.), but that's mostly because James is the outlierest of writers when it comes to donnée-based fiction and mischievously trapping innocent readers. 'We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, what the French call his donnée; our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it'.

    ReplyDelete
  10. This is just my sense of Dostoevsky's book, concisely stated. Dostoevsky's pre-existing world view, is my opinion. The two positions are not reconcilable by argument.

    The censored text is lost. All we have is the description in Fydor's letter. Wouldn't that change the book? The Existentialists would have had to argue around the religious stuff.

    I don't think Simenon is going to work for the "love" readers. He is a little too much on the cold side. They want warmth.

    You have encapsulated my fundamental anti-spoiler argument. Readers quickly pick up an enormous amount of information about whatever book they have picked up. Just knowing the author is Henry James - how much does that tell you? Readers protest their innocence, but they are already so corrupt.

    ReplyDelete
  11. I suspect you're right about the problems caused by Christian elements for some. While in grad school, I had heard various negative comments about Crime and Punishment, primarily about the ending--they were upset by R's conversion to Christianity at the end in prison. .

    ReplyDelete
  12. Now that is a good contrast: innocent vs corrupt and/or fallen. A whole blog post could be written on the implications of changing William Blake's title to 'Songs of Innocence and of Corruption'. The contrast also links nicely to that comment to your 'watched plot never spoils' post which explained how book bloggers are like snakes introducing innocent readers to the fruit of the tree of knowledge; and we all know how that ended the first time :)

    ReplyDelete
  13. How that ended, exactly - hey, what happened to my legs! Aaah, my legs! Sssss!

    Karamazov and The Idiot get around the problem of Dostoevsky's Orthodox ideology by the amazing array of voices he creates, none of them obviously right or wrong, even if we know from other sources which ones D. himself thinks are right and wrong. Notes is just that one voice, so that technique would not work.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Well, that is just one version of the story. To quote from 'Paradise Reconsidered in Gnostic Mythmaking, Rethinking Sethianism', to the Sethians/Ophites Gnostics: "the snake's advice to eat from the tree of knowledge is considered positive, the creator and his angels are turned into demonic beasts with specific names and the true Godhead is presented as an androgynous heavenly projection of Adam and Eve".

    On a different tack, very good points Mr. bailey. Dostoyevsky solves two mysteries: how can a cut-throat business like seamstressing be very profitable and what did the sewing cooperative need a French madam for?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Really, it's all right there on the page for anyone to see, isn't it?

      Delete
  15. I am 100% on the side of the snake here.

    Alexander Herzen picked up the same idea as Dostoevsky, just from reading a scene from Chernyshevsky's Utopian dream about a dancehall where couples wander off to little private cubbyholes for lovemaking, that Chernyshevsky had accidentally invented the French brothel.

    ReplyDelete